In the materials handling industry, conveyor belts and conveyor belt systems are well known and it is desirable to make such systems easy to disassemble and reassemble to accommodate different processing operations. In the food handling industry, however, the sanitary conditions imposed by the various governmental agencies are so strict, that it is often difficult to design sanitary conveyor belt systems which are readily disassemblable. This is because such sanitary regulations ordinarily require that there be no horizontal surfaces on which foreign particles such as food, grease, or water, may collect and no openings or voids into which liquids may seep and collect to breed bacteria.
As an example of this problem, consider conveyor belt pulleys for sanitary conveyors. The conveyor pulleys at both ends have a hub which allows the conveyor pulley to be mounted on a rotatable shaft. The sanitary regulations require that there be no opening between the housing of the conveyor belt pulley and the shaft into which liquid may seep and collect within the pulley housing to breed bacteria which might contaminate the food being processed. Thus, one solution to this problem has been, in the past, to simply weld the end of the pulley to the shaft to provide a liquid tight seal. One difficulty with this approach is that the pulley is thus unable to accommodate a different sized conveyor shaft. Also, to remove the pulley from the conveyor belt requires that the entire shaft and pulley housing be removed as one unit rather than simply by pulling the shaft out of the pulley housing.